


Snakes Like Us

by hyphyp



Series: Tumblr Fics [4]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 15:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6158632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyphyp/pseuds/hyphyp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond is good at killing people, Moneypenny is good at killing people, and they're even better at killing people together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snakes Like Us

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from [hydr0gencyan1de](http://hydr0gencyan1de.tumblr.com): 00£ AU where Eve is still on the field: pretending to be a couple

The drug runner’s mistress tries to poison Bond with a laced strawberry.   She runs it lightly across his lips, tempting him, waiting for him to take his own fatal bite, and he might have if Eve hadn’t warned him earlier in the car.

“She’s a real woman’s woman, that one,” she’d said, strapping a knife high up on her thigh.

“What, a lesbian?” Bond had asked, adjusting his cufflinks – care of Q branch, complete with lethal injections.

“No, you misunderstand me,” she said.  She looked amused.  “I mean she uses the woman’s weapon.  Poison.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because she has this look in her eye like she could just kill you, but doesn’t because she finds mess distasteful.”

Bond had rolled his eyes a little at that.  Clean deaths are a myth, Eve should know that.  There’s always blood, always the disarray a collapsing body leaves.  You could only claim that poison was neat if you had never watched someone’s mouth foam, watched their tongue and teeth dissolve or their organs heave like Pompeii.  Plus, a corpse had its own little ways of getting revenge.  The bowls released, gasses escaped, the whole empty flesh thing trembled and moaned as it settled around the void and into rigor mortis.

“I’ll tell you the real reason,” Eve said then, smiling so that Bond could see she had been teasing.  “It’s because she never eats or drinks anything someone else hasn’t had a taste of first.”

Bond sat up straighter.  “I hadn’t noticed.”

“No,” Eve said loftily.  “You were too busy watching her mouth to notice what everyone else’s were doing.  It’s a good thing you have me, James.  Or else what would have happened to you by now?”

I’d be dead, Bond thinks with the strawberry pressed to his mouth.  He deftly evades it and replaces his lips on the shell of the mistress’s ear.  She gasps, but it’s performance – she doesn’t shudder underneath him, no involuntary motion runs through her unchecked.

“Forgive me,” he breathes quietly, lowly, then pulls away.  “I don’t enjoy having that sort of thing in my bed.  I hate having to clean up.”

“It’s only a strawberry,” she pouts.  She arcs underneath him enticingly as she says ‘strawberry,’ lets her eyelashes fall over her pretty blue eyes.

“I wasn’t talking about strawberries,” Bond says.

She has only a moment to look bemused before she feels the prick.  Her eyes go wide, she opens her mouth, maybe to yell out or curse or just to say ‘oh,’ the way women sometimes do as they die.  Bond lets her sag in his arms and then drops her onto the bed.  As he’s redoing the belt on his pants and straightening his bowtie, Eve opens the door and observes the scene before her with glimmering eyes.

“So the poisoner is poisoned,” she says.  “Did you get what we need?”

“Yes,” he says shortly.

He had been about to die, after all.  There’s no point in hiding anything from a dead man.

“Shall we, then?” Eve asks, offering her arm.

Bond looks her over for just a moment – she’s a radiant thing in a long gold gown, diamonds flashing at her ears and neck, her cheeks flushed with roses – and then accepts.

“Awfully rude of us,” Eve says as they stride back down the hallway toward the ballroom, “to run off for a lover’s tryst in the middle of our host’s after dinner speech.  They might think we’re not fit for polite society.”

“Polite society,” Bond says, “is not fit for us.”

They slip back into the ballroom, a few knowing looks following them as they eye Bond’s slightly unkempt hair.  The drug runner and his wife are out among the dancing couples, oblivious to their entrance.  Mrs. Drug Runner is gazing fondly up at her husband and Bond wonders for not the first time at the capacity for bad people to fall in love.

“Darling,” Eve says loudly, “I suddenly fancy a turn around the dance floor.”

Bond replies with a smile and pulls her out into the crowd.

Eve’s left hand is warm in his, her other a solid weight on his shoulder, like the familiar feeling of his gun in its holster.  He’s never known a woman as useful as Eve, though it’s the sort of thing she’d despise to hear him say.

“Women are all useful to themselves,” he can already hear her dryly retorting in his mind.

“You’re in good form today, Richard,” the real Eve says, calling him by his cover name.  “If you keep staring at me with such besotted eyes, I’ll start to believe it.”

“And why on earth would that be a bad thing?” he asks.

“Because beliefs are often followed by expectations,” Eve supplies.

Bond grins and dips her low, nearly knocking another couple over in the process.  They huff and waltz off, leaving the path between them and the drug runner all the clearer.  When they rise, they pull themselves into the newly vacated space, edging nearer and nearer to their goal with every subsequent step.

“Does it bother you to know you’re wrist to wrist with a man whose cufflink was just used to kill his lover?” Bond asks, mostly teasing.

“Not at all,” Eve says.  “If I was worried you might kill me, I’d be more concerned with the hands.”

Their conversation lulls as they drift past a couple who are openly ogling them – the woman (as they do) at Bond and the man at Eve.  Bond grips her tighter and turns so that the lovely shape of her back is faced away from the intent eyes of her admirer.

“Possessive,” Eve notes.

“Of my fiancée?  Of course.”

Eve hits him on the shoulder – heavy, he always forgets how heavy her hits are somehow – and he loosens his hold a little.

“Do you want to know why poison is a woman’s weapon?” she asks.

“Because they’re fragile, on average,” Bond says.  “But poison can overthrow any strength.”

Eve laughs, a loud and rich sound that draws more attention.  Even the drug runner and his wife are looking at them now, curious, and just the slightest bit wary.

Eve leans in close, pressing her mouth to Bond’s ear in so close a mirror of his own earlier actions that he realizes she must have been watching the whole time.  A thrill runs through him.  He wonders what that says about him, to be aroused at the thought of her watching him kill.

“Poison is not a weak weapon,” she says quietly.  “It’s cold-blooded.  To prepare the poison, to plant it, offer it, and wait – that can only be done by premeditation.  You can slash a throat or break a neck or pull a trigger in the heat of the moment, out of passion.  But not poison.  That’s why it’s a woman’s weapon, because a woman doesn’t kill from the same place as a man, with her heart or emotions.  She kills with her brain.  She kills because she must.”

Eve leans away and examines Bond.  Though he is sure his face is as inscrutable as it always is, she seems to find what she wants there, for she smiles in satisfaction.  Perhaps she’s just better at reading him than he is at hiding.

“Snakes, the lot of you,” Bond says, not viciously, but with a little bitterness.

“Don’t be hypocritical, Richard,” Eve says.  “You put on those cufflinks this evening knowing exactly what they were.  Now kiss me, or no one will believe we’re engaged.”

He obeys, kissing her hotly, deeply, as if to prove how cold-blooded he’s not.  Regardless, he feels as though he’s yielding, admitting with every swipe of his tongue how cold his blood really his, how deeply he craves the warmth of Eve’s skin.

Bond recalls the mistress.  He recalls what he’d said and what he’d meant to say: I don’t enjoy having that sort of thing in my bed.  A snake, that is.

That’s not true, he thinks with the distant part of his mind that isn’t already preoccupied.  Snakes like us, we’re always huddling together for warmth.

A throat clears.  Eve and Bond break apart and plaster on innocent, inquiring smiles as they turn to face the drug runner and his wife.

“I don’t believe I know either of you,” the drug runner says.

And Bond dives into a description of their cover, Eve leaning into his arm and nodding earnestly along.

Later, when everyone has gotten to know each other much, much better – intimately, in fact – Eve wipes the blood free from her knife on the skin of her thigh and Bond watches with hot eyes.

Snakes like us, he thinks again.  It becomes a mantra, thick in his ears.  Snakes like us, snakes like us.  And also – how ironic that you would be called Eve.

Like snakes, they entwine.


End file.
